I’ve seen a few people have issues with Enterprise Vault Policy Manager (EVPM) recently. Each time there has been a failure with the error code 0x8004011D. It’s not a very helpful error code, even when you see the explanation :

* In my own repro environment where I have the Exchange 2003 Server and the Domain Controller / Global Catalog on the same machine, the issue is present. I’m not sure of the *cause* but the cure is to specify the SMTP address of the system mailbox, rather than the alias.

That’s an odd solution, I know, but it worked immediately.

* In another of my repro environments, with a slightly different setup, but essentially the same way of Exchange 2003, it was solved by specifying the NETBIOS name of the Exchange Server rather than the FQDN

* In yet another environment, this time for a customer, and discussed on our forums the issue was that the customer was using the name of a CAS, in their Exchange 2010 environment.

I guess that they had gotten used to the idea of specifying a CAS, as client access, including Outlook is done through that role in Exchange 2010. For EVPM though, it has to be the mailbox server.

This last example was fathomed out by one of Dev Managers (Hi Karl W), and he looked at the DTRACE. DTRACE of EVPM is possible, and is usually quite short, and helpful. Here is what a failure looked like in the above example :